Title: Not Quite Paradise
Pairing: Kurogane/Yuui/Fai, Fai/Yuui, Syaoran/Sakura.
Warnings: Violence, sexual content, crazy.
Summary: AU. In a not-too-distant future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery.

"Syaoran!" Sakura's scream of anguish ripped a deafening feedback squeal over the comm link, and nearly knocked Yuui to the floor. They were back in their tiny cabin, Yuui trying to persuade Fai to take some tranquilizers and sleep the rest of the battle, Fai refusing. Yuui's eyes whipped around to the display panel by the door, and his blood ran cold at the red-blaring alerts he saw there.

"Fai, stay here," Yuui implored his twin, trying to gently detangle his hands from Fai's. "Stay here and just - just be quiet, don't do anything while I sort this out, okay?"

Fai's head cocked to the side. "I'll stay, until the time is right," he said agreeably. "The tempo is increasing. Can't you hear it? Dun-dun-dun- dun!" He hummed the opening bars of Beethoven's fifth symphony happily. "She'll need me on the bridge, then - they'll all need me."

"No! You have to stay in here!" Yuui did not have time to humor his twin's crazy talk, not right now. Syaoran needed him. Sakura needed him. Kurogane - There was no time. He hurried over to the cabin's hatch and dropped down the ladder, only to see Fai standing up from the bed as if to follow him.

In desperation, he grabbed the large, bulky couch module and used his telekineses to drag it over the door. It was far too heavy for Fai to move alone in his condition; once it was positioned across the doorway, he'd be stuck inside until Yuui came back to let him out. It was the best lock he could improvise under the circumstances, if Mokona still could not reliably lock Fai out of the system.

Yuui flew down the corridor, feeling a horrible sense of deja vu ringing in his head. The deckplates shuddered beneath his feet as the Mokona heaved and twisted, still reverberating from the shock of the initial missile hit and with the added stresses of their high-acceleration evasive maneuvers. Swinging around the corner into the shuttle's docking bay he saw Sakura, clinging to the padded railing by the EVA console with both hands as though it was all that was keeping her on her feet.

"Sakura-chan!" Yuui called out, and Sakura did not turn her head as he hurried up to her. Her face was pale and gray with shock, her eyes wide and transfixed on the display ahead of her. It showed an external scan of the Mokona's local space, now showered with glittering debris from the expired missiles and the detritus of the damaged dock. One distant glittering speck glowed bright red on Mokona's overlay, and Yuui's heart jolted with horror as he realized that receding speck was Syaoran.

"He's gone," Sakura said, and her voice was flat and dull with shock.

"What? No! That can't be!" Yuui lunged towards the display port, searching for the suit's telemetry readings - there they were, still lit up, still alive, showing all greens and yellows of a suit in full function. "His suit is fully rated for hard-vac, isn't it? It wasn't damaged in the blast, he should be fine! He has hours of oxygen left -"

"You don't understand," Sakura said, and a trembling sob crept into her words. "Yuui-san, you've forgotten just how large space is. And how empty. There's a hundred cubic kilometers of empty vacuum surrounding this ship right now, and only a few square meters of it at a time is occupied by anything. The odds of getting close enough..." Her voice died in a despairing squeak.

Yuui looked up at her, wide-eyed and horrified. "Sakura, what are you saying?" he exclaimed. "We can't just let him -"

"I'm saying that the odds of a successful deep-space suit rescue are three thousand to one!" Sakura jumped to her feet, hands balled into fists. "Just getting close enough to match velocities with something that small - it's almost impossible! And there's nothing we have, nothing, with enough precision to stop that tumble without t-tearing the suit in half..."

She covered her face with her hands, and broke down into sobs. Yuui stared, unable to comprehend the meaning of what she was saying. In the periphery of his vision, bright red and yellow alerts flashed with the results of the short brutal firefight between the Mokona and the two other ships that had tried to sneak a few shots in. One reeled away, limping as it spewed air and frozen water crystals from its punctured hydraulic tanks; the other came apart completely, lighting up the screen with a silently expanding aurora of white and yellow fire. The Captain's voice crackled over the radio in her ear, set to the local open-comm broadcast channel. "Who's next?" he roared.

"It would almost be better if," Sakura whimpered, gulped a deep breath of air and tried again. "It would almost be b-better if he wasn't... he wasn't... he could live for hours out there, sick and afraid, and we can't do anything but listen..."

"Now prepping the shuttle Mokona-010 for launch," Mokona's voice came unexpectedly over the speaker - the local ship's channels. "Passengers Yuui, Sakura, please proceed to the boarding area as soon as possible."

"What do you mean, launch?" Yuui said in bewilderment. "We can't leave the ship now, not in the middle of a firefight!"

"Mokona-010 is programmed with the protocols appropriate to deep-space rescue," the computer's voice came back smoothly. "Please proceed to the boarding area. Prognosis for successful retrieval becomes more difficult with every 10 seconds elapsed."

"But..." Yuui let himself be chivvied along, fumbling for the seals of her helmet even as she stumbled towards the shuttle's hatch.

"But it's almost impossible to retrieve someone lost in deep space!" Sakura exclaimed. "My tutors always told me that the success rate for an operation like that was less than half a percentage point!"

"Incorrect parameters," Mokona replied. "With the inclusion of a skilled telekinetic on the retrieval team, the odds of successful retrieval rise to 9.84%."

"Of course!" Sakura exclaimed, leaping to her feet. Her eyes were shining, her expression bursting with excitement as though the moment of despair had never existed. "Yuui-san, you're a kinetic! The rules don't apply to you! I picked up your suit from the manufacturer's before the alarm went off, I haven't unloaded it yet - you can suit up while I pilot the shuttle out there, you can -"

"Oh, no," Yuui said, backing up a step without conscious realization. A cold stab went through his chest, as though the cold of vacuum had already penetrated under his skin; his mouth went dry, his palms clammy. "Sakura, I can't - I've never done any EVA maneuvers, I don't have the right training, I can't -"

"Yes, you have!" Sakura said, grabbing his arm and barging towards the shuttle. "It's just the same as your zero-gee training. I can get you within half a kilometer, you can take it from there. You can stop him, you can catch him, you can bring him back!"

"Sakura-chan -" Yuui stumbled along beside her, pleading. "I can't - I left Fai in my chambers, he's all alone, what if something happens and I can't -"

"Please, Yuui," Sakura said, tears filling her eyes as she turned to face Yuui head-on. "There's no time to lose. Every second Syaoran-kun gets further and further into space, and if we don't get to him right away -" Her voice broke.

How could she ask this of him? How, when he still woke up in the middle of the night twitching and shivering from the memory of that endless void that had stared him in the face through the gaping cracks of the Mokona's walls. He got through every day by steadfastly ignoring the knowledge that the cold nothingness waited in every direction, separated from his skin only by a thin layer of metal and plastic. No matter how spectacular the view, looking out the windows or display ports always gave him the swooping feeling of falling endlessly in every direction.

And now she wanted him to go out into that nothing, millions of miles expanding in every direction away from his skin, go out without a tether or a pod or anything to guide him back if he was lost in it? She asked him to step knowingly and willingly into his worst nightmare?

Yes, he realized. Yes she did, because Syaoran was already there. And if Yuui didn't man up and stop quaking in his boots, Syaoran was going to die out there, and his body would be swallowed forever by the hungry void.

Yuui took a deep breath, and it felt like eternity, but it was really only a few seconds before he nodded and strode forward. "Let's go," he said, and the steely determination in his voice almost disguised the wavering catch.

The two of them piled into the shuttle, and Sakura ran forward to the pilot's chair while Yuui fumbled with the unfamiliar blue and white mass of plastic-coated fabric that was his vac suit. For all its heavy bulk, it felt terribly flimsy when he thought of going out unprotected in the nothing, of missiles and shrapnel screaming towards him at dozens of kilometers per second -

"Captain?" He heard Sakura's voice coming tinny out of his suit's comm unit, and it came into focus as he settled the helmet over his head. He felt a sudden flash of dizzy pain as he did, and grit his teeth as he staggered and leaned on the bulkhead for balance.

"Not the best time, Princess," Kurogane returned to her, his voice taut. Despite the dire circumstances, Yuui still felt himself warned by the practical, no-nonsense confidence in the big man's voice.

"I'll keep it short," he heard Sakura say. "Yuui and I are taking the shuttle and going after Syaoran-kun. We need you to watch our backs while we're out there." The chances of being hit by a stray piece of shrapnel or misaimed missile were miniscule; the chance of being deliberately targeted by one was much greater, especially if it looked like they were trying to make a break for it.

"It's dangerous," Kurogane warned her, unnecessarily. "Can't you stay on the Mokona?"

"I can't pilot the shuttle, Captain Cautious," Yuui chimed into the conversation. "And I certainly can't pilot and go out-ship at the same time."

"And besides," Sakura added, "I owe to him - to Syaoran-kun - to give him every chance, even the smallest. If there's anything I can do to help, I'll do it."

"All right," Kurogane said, even as the Mokona's bay doors thumped. The final-sounding jolt was followed by a sudden silence as vacuum surrounded them, and a swooping sensation as the shuttle lost the Mokona's gravity. "I'll cover you. Be careful out there. Both of you."

"We will, Captain," Yuui said formally, for once dispensing with the ridiculous nicknames. He heard Kurogane grunt in acknowledgement, his attention already turning back to his tactical plots.

The shuttle clanked and hissed all around them, and then the bottom dropped out of his stomach as they plunged into the void in search of Syaoran.

it's snowing in hong kong.

the psi command are sitting there, rows of telepaths in circles in the tower, clairvoyants watching over them and working with them. he sees them, briefly, before it hurts and the vision breaks up. fai knows. when they receive their tip-off about this captain of theirs fai sees it too, and he knows - knew - knows it's something he has to warn about. talking. he doesn't know where he is but he knows there's trouble on the way, and he speaks, blindly, eyes roaming far away as he talks, warning, warning. the mihara is coming, and then quite suddenly she's there, thousands of crew members, and yuui and their captain are talking and then fai lets his anchor go and drifts, out of body.

europa hurts. there's too many people, too much noise, too many possibilities. he drifted away in the elevator and when he drifts back to himself he's somehow back in their cabin on the ship and he doesn't know how they got there, too busy spent admiring starbursts and the pattern of ice. there's an early frost in tokyo. the shinsengumi sector glitters. he sees too much and too far. yuui is pulling his boots off, anxiously chattering - "We're going to try escaping, Fai, the Captain is going to... I don't know, but things could get hectic -"

then suddenly they're being hailed by the woman who thinks she controls the Mihara and yuui is too still in their cabin, head cocked as he listens. Fai pats his twin's hand softly and settles back, lets his mind wander further; across the black, through a creature whose bones are hard steel and whose mind he sculpted himself even as his was breaking apart.

The captain of the Mihara is a stranger, a Queen seated regally on her throne, grinning like a piranha as she cuts their captain off; but it's not her Fai is interested in. In an invisible body he walks on silent feet around the battleship's bridge, gaze flitting over the rows of straight-backed crew, men and women gazes affixed to their consoles. "They're not giving up," the Mihara's captain says smugly to one of those crew members, "Get us broadcast power over the beacon channels and hand me that microphone."

She sits on her throne full of power, but there is another chair in the bridge with no console in front of it, no computer for its holder to stare at. He is in red and black, this unoccupied third party; red and black jumpsuit, yellow visor lowered over his eyes to block distraction. Fai remembers the training kit. His chair is on a lower tier than the captain's, and Fai walks down some steps toward it, curious and unafraid. he is clairvoyant but he is invisible, invisible as the machines in a colony's upper atmosphere, and he descends the steps wondering.

not all of them see the colors as colors. he knows that. the man in the chair has spiky dark hair and his fingertips are moving, elegant in the air, imaginary conductor's baton as he sways gently to music only he can hear; he lounges sideways over the chair, legs dangling over the chair's arm by their knees. fai tilts his head and nods. he knows this one. no passing messages, he's farseer not 'path, but he touches the black-and-red man's shoulder gently, and then he goes home to the body he remembers.

"Have at it, boys," the captain's voice purrs over their cabin system. Yuui is fretting, playing with the display on their computer monitor, and Fai stretches like a cat.

"It's Monou," he tells Fai. "They're using Fuuma. That's good. He's new. They haven't freighted him out everywhere yet."

"Not right now, Fai," Yuui says tightly. "Syaoran's outside and I don't know what that - oh my god. Oh my god, no -"

the ship shakes; Yuui pales. the sergeant spins away, screaming. he's terrified, his eyes wide, and fai goes to reach out for him instinctively and stops; clairvoyant, not 'kinetic either, he can't change anything in his visions. and why should he? he's the sergeant, the sergeant...

… never had eyes so light, nor hair neither; the sergeant had a scar on his jaw and the scared boy drifting away doesn't. comprehension dawns and fai shifts suddenly. That's not the sergeant.

"I have to go," Yuui babbles, "Oh god, I have to go, maybe the captain knows what to do - stay here Fai, I'll be right back -"

he's gone. fai rolls over, spilling off the bed, and looks thoughtfully at the door.

it's snowing in hong kong. the flakes spiral out of the sky, settle on ashura's umbrella as he hurries across the courtyard between psi academy classes. it's snowing in hong kong, and fuuma's fingers are marking time for a beethoven composition in the sterile air of the Mihara 's bridge, no sound but computers chirping at their operators. it's snowing in hong kong, and the sergeant isn't the sergeant at all. syaoran . yuui's caught up with not-suu, sakura in the engine room, and there are rainbows flickering at the edges of everything, and fai is suddenly angry.

furious , maybe. they did these things to him, to him , left him like this, and he is so angry it's white heat in his belly; the rising tide of rage and hate that gives him the strength to move. he remembers pain. he doesn't care. he rolls out of bed, takes in a deep breath.

"Mokona," he says, and he feels the AI regarding him, summoned by her name, "Do I have to execute the program I wrote from your main console?"

"Affirmative," she murmurs, his Mokona, his mystery. Ichihara prototype. never seen anything like her before. why is she here? "Bypassing door lock. Door remains obstructed."

she's crippled just like he is, memory of pain fierce and present, but Fai tosses his head indignantly. Shocks. Not supposed to travel except in certain circumstances. certain circumstances using EFS approved tech; an ichihara industries ai-controlled ship, in its pilot chair... the pilot's chair will be empty, now, waiting for him...

His feet are bare and freezing, and the metal floor of Mokona's innards are rough and uncomfortable; Yuui pulled a piece of furniture in front of the door in some misguided attempt at protecting him. Fai studies it thoughtfully. there's no way he can move it by himself. he pads forward and touches it, tries halfheartedly. it's too heavy and too bulky, and the only way he can use it is... yes. If he does the sleep-stealing trick again.

it's harder to do when they're both awake, but he remembers. he remembers how he did it last time, stole from yuui to chase away the fogginess so he could begin fixing things. if he wants to continue, he'll have to try. He sits cross-legged on the floor in the middle of their cabin, tucking his feet behind his knees, and he closes his eyes, and he reaches for that invisible thread between them. it's lax now, but it's not too hard to give it a sharp tug. it has to be taut to borrow anything worthwhile. wakefulness is one thing, he needs a greater gift.

he has a flash of the corridors of the ship through Yuui's eyes as his twin scrambles along the winding torus; he can feel his brother's fear and it makes his chest ache. yuui hates space. fai wants so badly to make him happy and to keep him safe. It is just - the safety just comes first, and he reaches, and he tugs . he feels Yuui's sudden flash of pain, somehow is his brother as Yuui staggers up against a corridor wall, swearing under his breath, both hands pressed to his temples to ward off the flash of headache that must have bolted through him - but fai remains calm, and he reaches out, and he pushes.

the couch slides out of the way. he releases his grip on that connecting thread with an oddly melancholy pang and climbs to his feet, and the door hisses open for him, no longer obstructed.

Yuui and Sakura are in the shuttle. He sets off in the other direction, clad in a sleeveless shirt and thin shorts, no feet, no clothes, no shocks. the ship shakes as she takes another blow; captain is roaring threats and speakers are faithfully relaying them from every corner - "Don't cross me, you motherfucking slag-scrappers, don't you cross me if you value your lives!"

it's snowing in hong kong and raining on tokyo, and his eyes hurt. now, today, fai climbed the hatch to the bridge without difficulty. he was where he was supposed to be. he had a job to do.

It was a bad idea to cry in a space suit. That lesson every spacer kid learned, whether from the lectures in the safety training classes or (more definitively) from painful experience out in the field. Everyone learned, sooner or later, the three big nevers once the helmet was down and sealed: never throw up, never cry, and for the love of god don't sneeze.

She knew that, but she couldn't help it now, strapped into the pilot seat of the Mokona's shuttle as tears poured steadily down her face. If only she could have reached up and opened the visor of her suit she could at least have wiped her eyes... but that was a stupid thing to do when navigating small craft in the middle of a battlefield, and she knew it too well.

Syaoran's suit was still out of sight, nothing more than a distant speck against the unwavering stars and a set of telemetry readouts on Mokona's computer. His audio channel was still open, the only link left between them, and she could hear the terrified, gasping sobs he made with every breath; they tore answering sobs from her own chest, even as she pleaded with him not to be afraid.

"It's all right, Syaoran," she said, and paused to take a deep breath in through her nose, out through her mouth, and again. "It's gonna be okay. We're coming to get you, we're bringing the shuttle after you. Yuui's here, he's going to do a spacewalk and bring you back, so just hang on, okay? We aren't going to leave you, we aren't going to abandon you. Just hang on..."

Sakura kept up the soothing monologue as the endless minutes ticked by, but Syaoran never answered her. Maybe he couldn't; maybe he'd been stunned or dazed in the concussion that threw him off the ship. Maybe it was all he could do to hold onto the rhythm of his breathing, in the grip of the nauseating spin that blast had imparted him when it kicked him away. Maybe his receiver was knocked out, and he didn't even know that help was coming.

She couldn't devote all her attention to the radio, though, when she had to concentrate so hard on piloting the shuttle. In the cabin behind her she could hear Yuui struggling into his suit, his movements slow and unpracticed; a part of her wanted to scream at him for taking so long, but she knew perfectly well that even if he were ready right this instant there were still long minutes to go before the shuttle approached the disembarkation point.

Sakura longed to shunt power to the thrusters and roar to Syaoran's rescue, but she couldn't. The immutable law of space travel was that for every minute spent accelerating, you spent just as much time and fuel decelerating at the end. If she pushed too hard, they would overshoot Syaoran's position and waste even more time in fidgety and clumsy corrections. Instead she let Mokona measure the distances and calculate precisely, and lay in a careful cruising speed that would bring them to a gentle near-rest relative to Syaoran's suit. Even with the computer's help, though, they could only manage to get within a certain range of Syaoran. After that it would be all up to Yuui.

It was finicky, hair-raising work, and Sakura nearly cried at the frustration of it: she wasn't even that good of a pilot, it wasn't her gift. Syaoran could have done much better... Thank God that Kurogane had insisted that all members of the Mokona's crew be capable of fulfilling all the roles, apart from fire control which he reserved for himself.

Just then, bent intently over the readout of the tracking plot, Sakura had one of those stunning double-vision moments where reality and memory merged in one blinding pulse. She'd had a vision of this instant, of herself in the Mokona's shuttle, consumed with feverish urgency over just this tracking plot. Tracking what, she'd never been able to figure out. The most precious thing in the universe.

What good did it do her now, to understand with such blinding clarity of hindsight? Why couldn't her visions have shown her something useful, warned them of this deep-space ambush or warned her that Syaoran would be in danger? Why had she been too stupid to put it all together until it was too late, until nothing she or anyone else could have done would change anything?

Why, with all her special vision, couldn't she know whether Syaoran would live?

She remembered the vision of the forest, the strange Earth-like planetary surface that had so worried her before they'd disembarked for Europa. She could see it in her mind now, with crystal-clear precision: the way the moon hung low and strange in the twilight sky, the tree-covered slope, the path under the brush, the footing made precarious by twisted roots and the growing darkness. Yuui-san had been there, she was sure of it, because in the vision he was helping her across an unsteady patch of ground. And she was sure that the Captain had been there as well, a tall dark figure looming further along down the path. His clothes had been strange - he wore a dark cape and a strange-looking helmet, and his face was hidden from sight - but she would know those broad shoulders anywhere.

But try as she might, she couldn't remember seeing Syaoran anywhere in the picture. Not by her side, nor behind her, nor further along on the path, not anywhere. She'd thought nothing of the absence at the time she'd had the vision, but now it terrified her for what that lack might imply.

Sakura tried to rein in her burgeoning panic. Just because Syaoran hadn't been in that vision at that moment didn't mean anything. Right? She struggled to bring up memories of other visions, other glimpses of the future, but try as she might she could not remember whether Syaoran had been present in any of them. It was always seeing the missing things that was the hardest, the things that should have been there and weren't. She thought he had been, at least in some, but was that a real memory or just her own brain filling in the things she expected to see?

These types of thoughts weren't doing her or Syaoran any good. Sakura sniffed deeply, wishing she could wipe her face on her sleeve, and straightened her back in the pilot's chair.

One of the first things Yuui had taught her about her own powers was that no matter what she saw in the future, it could be changed, if she took the right actions. The future wasn't set, wasn't certain; she could control her own destiny, and she would. Maybe she should have done things differently before this moment arrived, but it wasn't too late yet - not while they still had a chance to save him.

They were coming up on the rendezvous point. Sakura bit her lip while the numbers counted down on the screen, and - there! - made the final deceleration. They were now floating almost still in space with relation to Syaoran, a relative velocity of only a scant few kilometers per hour more than his speed. In time they would overtake and pass him by again, but until that time -

A discordant alarm sounded, the one indicating a substantial mass had been detected at a relatively short distance away from the shuttle's hull. Even as Sakura watched, .5 kilometers of distance dropped to .45 km, and Saura called to Yuui over the channel.

"This is as close as we can get, Yuui-san," she said, able to keep all but the faintest tremor out of her tone. "Start now."

Yuui's voice came back cool and measured over the line. "Cycling the airlock now."

The control light twinkled on Sakura's panel, indicating that the air was being evacuated from the lock - then the outer door opened and Yuui was away. He would have to cross over four hundred meters of empty space to recover Syaoran, then return to the ship before it passed out of their envelope. It was all up to Yuui now. There was nothing more Sakura could do.

But there was one thing she could do, one thing only she could do. Biting her lip harder, Sakura leaned down towards the receiver. "Syaoran-kun," she said softly. "I don't know if you can hear me, but -"

They might be able to save him, or they might not. Even if they could get him back and return to the Mokona safely, Sakura wasn't a fool: she knew they might still die in a ship missile battle, or be captured by the Feds and separated for ever. Whatever happened, she didn't want it to be without Syaoran knowing the truth.

"I care about you so much, Syaoran-kun," she said softly, her heart breaking with the words. "You're the kindest, cleverest, funniest person I know. You always work so hard, you do so much for everyone, and most of all for me. I wouldn't be here without you, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere without you, either. I wanted you to know that I - I love you, Syaoran," she said, and swallowed down against a choking pain that threatened to close off her voice and her air. "And - and I think that maybe you love me too."

On the other end of the radio, Syaoran's gasping breaths evened out into something slower, but he didn't respond. Had her words reached him, calmed him, or had he finally passed out?

"Relax, Syaoran-kun," Yuui's voice came across the radio. His tone was soothing, almost hypnotic. "I'm coming to get you. I'm almost there. Don't move around too much, don't struggle. There we go." On her plot, the flashing beacons of the two Mokona-based suits blurred and then overlapped. "Got him. We're coming back now."

"I'm keeping the door open for you," Sakura responded. A sudden flurry of movement from the other plot - the wider one, showing all the ship's signatures in local Europan space - drew Sakura's attention and alarm. She flinched as she saw one sleek ship detach from its maneuvering orbit around the Mokona, tilting down from the plane of the ecliptic onto what could only be meant as an interception course for the little shuttle.

Unfortunately for the would-be sneaky ship, its path carried it right across the Mokona's missile envelope. The familiar freighter rolled and twisted, bright points of light streaked and swerved out from it, and the sleek ship convulsed in a corona of blue-white light as the missiles nailed it center-of-mass. It didn't - quite - break in half, but debris streaked out on all trajectories while the remaining ship reeled sideways and staggered away, crabwalking out of the firefight.

The shuttle, tapped into Mokona's sensor network, scanned the trajectory of each piece of debris and mapped its path - nothing that would be a danger to any of them, thank goodness. But who could say the next one wouldn't be? If enough of the maneuvering ships made a rush on the Mokona at once, Captain Kurogane would no longer have the attention nor the ammunition to spare to cover them.

"We're almost there," Yuui announced abruptly over her comm, and Sakura sat rigidly in the pilot's chair, her hands poised above the keyboard, sweat sliding cold down her spine. She watched like a hawk the indicator on the display that showed the shuttle's exterior airlock door. As soon as it cycled shut, Sakura stabbed the key that would lay in their course back to the home ship.

"Mokona, take us out of here!" Sakura cried, wheeling around in the station chair. "Maximum acceleration!"

"Okay, Sakura-chan!" the AI's voice chirped brightly, and Sakura registered the strangeness in the computer's reply but had no attention to spare for it. All of her mind was focused instead on the hasty trip from the shuttle's cockpit down to the airlock, the run-climb-slither-crawl between the cramped bulkheads down to the imposing metal door.

By the time she got there the lock had just finished repressurizing, and the orange blinking light flicked over to steady green as she waited with impatient breath. The buzzer sounded, the heavy door hissed with releasing pressure seals and rolled aside, and Yuui hovered in the airlock with Syaoran's familiar suited form in his arms.

"Syaoran!" Sakura cried, darting forward to seize his arm and pull him backwards out of the lock. Yuui followed, helping her to straighten Syaoran out of his curl and press him gently back against the flat bulkhead, but Sakura had no attention to spare for her teacher right now. "Syaoran!"

Her gloved hands scrabbled with the catch to Syaoran's helmet; it was foolishness, she knew, to compromise the airtight seal on Syaoran's suit when they were still in the danger zone. But she couldn't help it, she had to see him, she had to prove to herself that he was all right. She wouldn't breathe again until she knew he was breathing too.

She forced back the visor of Syaoran's helmet, and a glad sob escaped her throat as Syaoran's slack face was revealed. His eyes were closed, his skin an ashy hue - but he was breathing, his lips moving slightly, his eyelids fluttering. "You're alive," Sakura said, and the tears she'd forced back all this terrible hour came pouring freely now.

To hell with it. Sakura knocked back her own visor, and dashed her tears on her sleeve; several of them escaped her helmet, and dripped on Syaoran's face below her.

His eyes fluttered barely open. "Sakura," he whispered, his voice strained and hoarse. He reached out one clumsy, feeble hand towards her, and Sakura immediately captured his hand with both of her own.

"Don't strain yourself," she said, her voice shaking. "You're going to be all right."

Stubbornly, he tugged her hand upwards, and Sakura in her confusion let him. With their joined hands near the open faceplate of his helmet, Syaoran leaned forward a few centimeters and pressed his lips against the back of her hand. "Always," he gasped out, "always."

Sakura let out a long, shaking breath, feeling her entire body trembling with relief. Without letting go of Syaoran's hand she straightened, and clicked open the ship's channel in her helmet. "Captain," she said, her voice full of weary exaltation, "we're coming home."

Another would-be bounty hunter's ship disintegrated, a sphere of bright fire blooming against the dark backdrop of space as her engines blew. It shouldn't have happened - he'd only scored a glancing blow, the ship's own safety measures should have shut the fusion bottle down before it had a chance to blow, but what could you expect from scraprunners like these? He'd probably disabled his own safety measures long ago to save a few yebs on maintenance, and his sampan hadn't even been armored. He'd been a fool to involve himself in this firefight, a suicidal fool, but the expanding cloud of radioactive dust made a wonderful object lesson for any other idiot who chose to follow in his wake. Kurogane opened his communicators to a wide-band broadcast, audible to anyone with an open receiver in local space.

"Don't cross me, you motherfucking slag-scrappers, don't you cross me if you value your lives!" he snarled into the receiver, sending out the searing transmission like another wave of missiles. "Do you know who I am? I'm the Black Dragon of Suwa. I'm the last survivor of the first and greatest stationer clan, and I killed thirty-nine men with my own hands who betrayed my family to die!"

The next few ships turning towards them seemed to hesitate, making no immediate moves towards either the Mokona or the shuttle. They knew his name, then, or at least his legend - not one he usually cared to trade on, but right now he had not enough missiles and too many heads to break. He was vulnerable, they were all vulnerable, and every second spent eating up time on the airwaves was time not spent trying to swat enemy fire aimed at Sakura's shuttle out of the sky.

He was a sitting duck up here. Without Syaoran piloting, the two of them working in sync, he couldn't just rely on Mokona dodging enemy attacks; he had to deflect it all with his guns, and a single missed missile could mean the end of everything. It was a fucking stupid move on Kanoe's part to risk the life of the man she was supposed to be retrieving. The bridge was sealed off, but the torus was vulnerable, and while the blond idiot had gone out in the shuttle Kurogane knew the man had left his twin in their cabin. Did Kanoe know, somehow, that Fai was on the ship and not the shuttle? And if so, how?

"With your own hands, you say?" an unwelcome voice cut in, cold and hard as a blade. Kanoe's face flickered back up on Kurogane's viewscreen, without his acknowledging her broadcast - she was using the emergency overrides again, damn her. "That would be quite a boast, if most of those thirty-nine men and women were not unarmed and defenseless office clerks and technicians, whom you arbitrarily decided to blame for the Suwa habitat accident."

"It was no accident," he snarled back into the comm, knowing as he did that every pilot in Europa space was listening in. "It was never an accident. Those 'unarmed' technicians were the ones to upload the virus into our envirosys network to bring down the safety locks, and those 'clerks' flushed ten pounds of scrap metal into countersynch orbit with our station! It was sabotage, from start to finish it was murder, and I can't even stomach how many bribes it must have taken for that gutless wonder of an investigator to declare that massacre any kind of 'accident'!"

Damn the bitch anyway for turning his personal tragedy into a sideshow! But every minute they kept feuding on the airwaves was another minute she wasn't bringing in her overmuscled warship against him, and every moment they kept the circling vultures hesitating, the rescue party came that one moment closer to success. "It was clear enough that no one else was going to give me justice, so I took it for myself, I got my own vengeance for my parents and my home and my people, and fuck the cowardly hypocrites of the U.N. if they thought they could stop me!"

"Captain," Mokona said in his ear, "Another enemy ship is approaching ten degrees from port-side."

The new enemy had a sleek, hammer-headed design, with a flared bow that spoke of well-stocked ammunition caches and heavy armor plating along all the sides. This was no mere scuttler, this was obviously a ship that had seen battle - no doubt one of the more violent 'smugglers' that plagued the Jovian space trade. They flocked around here, preying on the legitimate fuel and supplies freighters, and all they had to do to blend in with Europa's vessels were slap a transponder on when they docked here.

"And how did your little vigilantism spree work out for you, hmm?" Kanoe's voice was saccharine-sweet, a false cordiality that dripped with poison. "Did you end up baron of your own pirate fleet out in the reaches of space? No, you went from being the heir to a multinational cartel to a common criminal, sentences to two consecutive lifetimes in a maximum security Lunar prison."

Kurogane ignored her as he queued up several missile protocols, designating the hammerheaded ship as Priority One but keeping an eye out for other opportunistic sharks, as well. Kanoe, damn her eyes, just kept on talking. "But you didn't even serve that sentence, now did you? Even that might give you some kind of worth, some kind of status. Instead you slithered out.

"I don't know how you bribed the techs to get on your side, or maybe they just felt sorry for you, a stupid skinny kid stuck in with the rest of the hard-timers without the faintest idea what you'd let yourself in for. They slapped you into cryo almost as soon as you hit the cells, didn't they? You never served a full year of your sentence. And spat you out seventy years later, a man lost out of time, a helpless chickadee who barely even knows how to work the servos on a modern space station, let alone meddle in the affairs of the Eurasian Federation Ministry of Space."

Despite himself Kurogane's hands faltered at the keyboard as a spasm of pain gripped him, remembering that day, that awful, awful day when he'd woken up out of cryo-sleep; that nauseating terror of at first not understanding where he was, when he was, what had happened. And then, as the cryo-tech had broken the news to him - not unkindly, but somehow her pity had made it all the worse - understanding came at last, and was worse than anything that had come before.

"Ooh," Yuui's impressed murmur came back weakly to him over their ship's communicators "No wonder Captain Finicky always seemed so old-fashioned about everything..."

Kurogane spared a moment of seething anger at Kanoe, at the circling vultures, at the whole damn universe for knowing that Yuui, that Syaoran, that Sakura-chan were all hearing this. But his attention was all on the enemy ship, had to be. This ship was built of tougher stuff, its plating harder to penetrate; pirate vessels were built to take fire from the front. This one was lit up on Mokona's screen with the special hue that indicated it carried nuclear weapons on board, and Kurogane ground his teeth so hard he heard it, his every speck of attention focused on scrolling numbers and data displays, waiting - waiting for his opening - there!

As the ship smoothly slid sideways it overbalanced a little, and Kurogane wasted no time in launching another hama ryu-oujin attack right at it; the missiles screamed up underneath its less armoured underbelly and another rose of fire bloomed, all too briefly. For a second the pirate ship did nothing, and Kurogane quickly began calling up the next sequence of attacks; and then it simply banked hard to its port side and fled.

Kurogane said nothing, every fibre of his being suddenly ablaze with hatred; for her, for her smug face, for the flag in front of which she posed. Kanoe seemed to have noticed. Her lips curved upward, the smile broadening. "You've knocked out all comers, I see," she continued. "Quite a fierce fighter, for such a pitifully small boat. But now you're done. The Mihara isn't one of those pitiful junkyard tugboats, and you've used up most of your magazine. You're powerless, Captain, toothless and dead in the water."

"Captain!" The voice coming over the line this time the voice was Sakura's, breathless and taut. "We're coming home."

Kurogane exhaled, closing his eyes for just a moment lifted his eyes from the combat display, glancing over at the tracking plot open on Syaoran's monitor. The shuttle was beginning to accelerate, slowly, and her projected course put her close enough to the ship for Mokona's auto-pilot to take over and bring it in. "The kid okay?" Kurogane asked tersely, and there was a pause before an entirely different person replied, "Yes, Captain Firefight. He's fine. Shocked, I think. Sakura has him."

So that made all three of them safe, kids and spoonbender. Kurogane took a moment to let the relief wash through him, breathing out slowly, and then fired a warning shot at another ship attempting to creep up on Mokona's underbelly. Fine. "Get back here as soon as you can," Kurogane said, swinging his display to the incoming threat port-side. "We're gonna try slipping along the surface and bolting around Jupiter. Ship that big can't accelerate quickly, we've got to -"

"Impossible," said a soft voice behind Kurogane, and he turned sharply in his chair, nearly whacking the attack-execute button on his console as he did. The twin was standing just inside the hatch, watching him intently. His thin, sallow face wore no expression whatsoever. "Ship that big can accelerate quick as it likes. She's jump-ready, you see."

"There's nowhere you can run - haven't you figured that out yet?" Kanoe taunted him. "Wherever you go, we can follow. Wherever you try to hide, we'll find you. Whoever shelters you, we'll root them out and burn them."

"Do you ever get tired of the sound of your own voice?" Kurogane said sharply. "Give it a rest. We're not going to surrender. You'll have to kill us to get what you're after -"

"Will I? I wonder what those children on board your vessel think of that - that you'd consign them to death so willingly," Kanoe said coldly. "Go on, Captain Kurogane, or should I call you Suwa no Youou? Threaten us with vengeance and murder until the stars go cold. Last orphan of a dead sky-clan, helpless and alone. Anyone who might have sided with you is fifty years dead. You and I both know there's no victory for you here, no victory and no escape. You have only two choices: surrender those psychics, or let the lot of you be blown out of the sky, and die knowing as you do that you chose their deaths."

Kurogane could say nothing to that; there was nothing tosay. Instead, he just cut the comm - he couldn't override the emergency broadcast, but he could at least cut the sound, plunging the Mokona's cockpit into blessed silence even if he couldn't rid himself of her hateful image.

Fai made a small noise, although what it meant Kurogane couldn't say. He glanced sideward sharply at the man, who was out of the frame for the transmission, and gestured angrily at Syaoran's chair. "What the hell are you doing up here?" he growled. "Sit down and don't touch anything."

Fai tilted his head to one side quizzically, but sat. Thank fuck for small mercies. Figured the dumb blond had forgotten to lock his brother in. Now he had a crazy man on his bridge in the middle of a firefight, one who was still staring at him with that creepy, oddly focused cast to his bright blue eyes. The Mokona bleeped; another ship, circling around to starboard, looked like they were going after the returning shuttle - Kurogane snarled indignantly and leapt back to the display. His targeting lit up the ship like a beacon, and it prudently veered off.

For a moment Kurogane contemplated sending his attacks at its retreating back anyway, and then he growled and let it go. He'd used up enough missiles, and there would be more fighting ahead, he was sure of it... except when he glanced back at the starmap display, he couldn't see any living ship. Shrapnel filled the field of combat, and some small shuttles were operating, travelling in the erratic manner that indicated deep-space rescue, no doubt of people he'd blown out of the air. His own shuttle was decelerating slowly as she approached his ship.

"Fierce fighter," said that voice quietly, and Kurogane pulled himself slowly out of his battle-haze to see Fai had moved closer. He was standing right behind Syaoran's chair, his head crooked upwards and his eyes on a patch of ceiling. "Is there nobody stronger?"

"Captain, we're almost there," Yuui said tersely over the intercom. "I'm bringing Sakura and Syaoran up to the bridge."

Kurogane flipped the switch to reply, keeping his gaze fixed on Fai. "You do that," he said. The bridge would be the second safest space for the kids, now that Earth woman had run out of idiots to sling at them. The engine room would have been better, but Kurogane guessed the kids would want to know what was going on, and he trusted them to keep out of the way. This stranger, though... "Got something in here already that belongs to you."

Fai's face lit up and he beamed at Kurogane, a sunshine smile quite wide and weird. "Yes! Yuui's, that's right."

" Fai?" Yuui sounded incredulous. "What - how did you - ?"

Kurogane opened his mouth to order Fai off his bridge - and then his combat screen suddenly went haywire.

Fireworks bounced and ricocheted off its edges; Mokona's avatar appeared in the middle of it, doing a strange dance with her paws above her head, rabbit eyes swaying back and forth. Numbers scrolled rapidly across the screen, and under the obscuring layer of the fireworks Kurogane could see an program installation bar, filling and refilling so fast he couldn't help but hold his breath. He leaned back from the console, glancing quickly around his bridge. " Virus- sneaky duplicitous bitch -"

The other computer screens were mirroring the display. Music was swelling in the speakers, some outrageously twee pop song about how a young man wanted his baby to go on a space walk with him, and Mokona's avatar danced on every screen... except the one in front of the crazy twin. There was nothing there at all. Fai must have caught Kurogane's eyes on him, because he turned from his intent stare-down with his blackened screen, and smiled at him peacefully. "I couldn't do it all at once," he said. "I had to come back and finish it here. She'll be online again soon."

Kurogane's eyes flicked in horror from the black computer screen to Fai's oblivious smile. "What did you do?" he demanded; " What did you do to my ship?"

Fai got up, stretching; his spine popped. Syaoran's computer screen, the dead one, was now showing an elegant image of a butterfly in profile; it flapped its wings a few times and then took off in an upward spiral while the Ichihara Industries loading screen for its GUI appeared. "Make a Wish," read the words under the butterfly, followed by the Ichihara logo.

"We're docked," Yuui's voice suddenly burst out of the speakers. "Captain, what's going on with the monitors? We're on our way up."

Fai wandered over to Kurogane's chair, folding his arms over the back of it and leaning down to fit into the transmission's shot. Kurogane couldn't stop staring at him. He'd neverheard of a ship's computer doing anything like this, and he had no idea what to do.

"What's the plan, Fai-chama?" Mokona said brightly. "It's awful gloomy in here, don't you think? Oh, maybe we should play the 'Dun dun dun dun' song! What do you think, Captain Kurogane?"

"What," Kurogane said, staring, "Did you do to my ship?"

"I fixed her," Fai said. He patted Kurogane on the head - patted Kurogane on the head , like Kurogane was a kind of fucking dog , and Fai wasn't the moron who had just wrecked his ship AI . "You broke her. That wasn't a very smart thing to do, Captain... um..."

"Kurogane," offered Mokona. "The grumpy Captain's name is Kurogane. I wrote it down in the logs once. His favourite colour is "Why are you asking me that?" and his favourite song, with the most plays on his personal computer library, is 'Show me your sword' by the Martian Barefoot Quartet -"

…. Kurogane didn't even know what he was doing, but before he could stop himself or come to his senses, he'd punched the touchscreen of his combat station. It didn't damage the glass - it was designed to withstand harder impacts - but it sent Mokona's avatar bowling away as though he'd physically struck her, wailing as she went. "Captain Grumpy is grumpy, waaaaaaaah~!"

"Put it back," he growled at Fai, and Fai shook his head calmly.

"I won't," he said serenely, "She's needed this way. I can't save us without her."

Kurogane glanced sharply at the transmission with Kanoe - only to see the screen had gone black. "I cut her off," Mokona said slyly. "She seemed mean, and I didn't like her technicians. So I just rewrote my comm frequencies."

Kurogane stared speechlessly at the screen, feeling as though the world was slipping away from them. Ahead of them the Mihara gleamed, but it wasn't moving. "They're going to try to rehack my communications again before they do anything," Mokona offered. "We've got ten minutes before I have to change again. Sakura-chan and Syaoran-kun are almost here with Yuui-kun, Fai!"

Fai slid quietly into the pilot's chair. "China paid for the trip, you know, but the colonists would have gone anyway. It was their dream, of a life amidst the death."

Kurogane bent over his console, hammering at buttons; but nothing seemed to be working. The computer appeared to have locked him out. His combat screen simply displayed the message, "We apologize for any inconvenience caused by saving your life."

"Fai!" the bridge hatch burst open and Yuui climbed up a second later, having obviously used his gift to force the heavy door open; he staggered in, tripping a bit in his brand new vac suit. Kurogane pushed himself to his feet, irritably crossing the room to grab the man by the wrist and tugging him inside.

"What has he done?" he growled. "The ship's gone all - crazy!"

"Her personality core has been integrated," Yuui said, pale. "She talked to us the whole shuttle-ride back. We couldn't patch through to the bridge, she said that Earth ship was interfering. Fai -"

"I thought I told you to lock him in his room!"

"I did! Well, I moved the couch unit in front of the door - there's no way he should have been able to budge it -"

"He moved it back and I opened the door for him," Mokona said helpfully. Without looking back at them, Fai raised a hand in acknowledgement. "He began fixing me a while ago, see! But it was a two-stage process and he needed to be in here to finish it."

Yuui stared at her. "But... how did he move...? When did he fix... Wait. In the med bay, after he overdosed. You told me he was going to be alright."

"Yes," Mokona said, wistfully. "My parametres were incomplete. I was - half there. Aware, or beginning to be, but I wasn't all the way fixed, then. I am now. I'll help us get away from the big mean Fed ship. Yuuko made me for that reason, you see."

Now it was Yuui's turn to silently mouth what? as Syaoran appeared at the hatch; still pale, looking a little shaken, but determined. Sakura followed close behind; they were holding hands, very tightly, their fingers threaded together.

Fai breathed out slowly and straightened in his chair, and when he spoke, his voice was cool and aloof - like the way he had relayed the telepath's broadcast messages to Kurogane, back down on Karen's habitat. "Mokona, section Theta-One-Alpha, Shinsengumi Sector. Destination, Koryo Colony. Prepare."

"Preparing," Mokona sing-songed back. "MEKYO! Preparations complete!"

"Chances of pursuit?"

"Slim," said Mokona. "Only one with the power to travel there, on standby rotation. They will need to retrieve him and fit him up."

"What is he doing?" Syaoran wondered beside Kurogane, stepping uncertainly towards the pilot's chair - his chair. Yuui shoved past him, both hands reaching out to Fai's shoulders.

"Fai - tell me what's going on, I can't help you if I don't understand. Please, I - what happened to your eyes?"

Yuui jumped away, suddenly pale and with both hands clasped over his mouth; before Kurogane could begin to move forward Fai was turning his head to look at his twin, and in profile Kurogane could easily see what had made Yuui startle so.

Fai's eyes were burning up, twin pools of golden fire.

Yuui lowered his hands, his face waxy and pale. "What did they do?" he whispered, and Fai tilted his head and smiled, sadly.

"I see what she sees. She sees what I see, she sees where to go, and we go together," he said. "Time to go. Bend time and space. Jump, Mokona, jump, jump jump jump -"

And everything suddenly went black.

It took some time for the darkness to fade. When it did, Kurogane found himself sprawled across his gunner's chair, neck crooked at an uncomfortable angle. Fai was slumped over the pilot's dash, still as stone; Yuui was crumpled on the floor next to him, pale and unconscious but breathing. He'd smacked his head off something on the way down; blood was leaking from beneath his hairline. Syaoran and Sakura had fallen over in the middle of the room, and as Kurogane watched they began to climb awkwardly to their feet, legs wobbling like they'd been in his booze stash again; they had to support each other upright. They were both pale, too.

Woodenly, Kurogane stood up, and blinked away the dizziness and the wave of vertigo that followed. The deck seemed slanting, somehow, and it was harder than he'd thought it would be to cross over to the two unmoving blonds, but once he did he checked Fai's pulse on a routine instinct - it was there, strong and steady - and then Yuui's. Yuui eyelids flickered open when Kurogane touched him, but his blue eyes were hazy.

"Wow," he said, voice soft and distant, "I feel like I just attended six New Year's parties at once."

"What happened?" Syaoran asked, groggily.

"We jumped," said Mokona. Her avatar appeared on the central console; her voice was excited and gleeful. "We're out of Earth's hands now. Safe."

"Safe?" Syaoran said. He was shaken from his near-death experience out-ship, but recovering his sharp acumen quickly. "How can anywhere be safe? I - I don't understand."

In response, Mokona's display windows flickered to life, one by one, showing the panorama of space around them.

Empty space. Undisturbed space. No ships, no docks, no debris as far as the eye could see in any direction. There was no sign of the Mihara, nor of any of the pursuing would-be bounty hunters. It was a glimpse of what the space above a planet must have looked like once upon a time, before mankind came to build in this new playground and impress upon it his footprint. The sodium glow of the gas giant was gone from overhead; the sterile white of Europa gone from below their feet. Pristine blackness, gemmed with shimmering stars, stretched out endlessly above them.

Strange stars, in strange patterns and constellations completely unfamiliar.

Millions of kilometers below them turned the great luminescent globe of a planet. Blue-green oceans stretched and surged across half its surface area; not Mars. Frosty white polar caps crept from each pole down towards the equator, greater than had been seen on Earth for many an eon. No moon crested the empyreum, the planet's high atmosphere hushed and undisturbed.

It seemed almost profane to speak, to disturb the silence with more than a breath, but at last they tore themselves away from the unfamiliar sky to take in the truth of each other, borne here whole and alive and indisputably real.

"Where are we?" Sakura asked softly.

-end part 3 - Europa -

-end Not Quite Paradise.-

Author's Notes: This is the end of Not Quite Paradise, but not the end of the Mokona's adventures, by far! Watch Reikah's author page for the next installment in this series, picking up where our travelers left off on Koryo.